Practice Healthy Differentiation: Skill 4: When noticing emotional upset in someone close to you, remain grounded and authentically choose
Each MCD Relationship Competency identifies 6 Skills, along with specific practices for learning each. For more context about MCD Relationship Competency 12: Healthy Differentiation, see Skill 1: Articulate the core values by which you make major decisions, Skill 2: Name at least five strengths you have that help you contribute to others, and Skill 3: Express and hear differences between you and another while remaining grounded and nonreactive.
Skill 4: When noticing emotional upset in someone close to you, remain grounded and authentically choose whether you would like to offer support or tend to needs of your own
Another important aspect of differentiation means holding space for another’s emotional state without shifting your own. From a place of healthy differentiation, when you see that someone is upset, compassion naturally arises and you can discern how you would like to respond.
Two major patterns of reactivity interfere with this connected responsiveness: enmeshment and disconnecting or disengagement. When you can fully recognize these patterns operating in your life, you can pause, self-regulate, anchor, and choose a new way forward.
Practice
Take a few minutes now to review the signs and symptoms of enmeshment and disengagement listed below. If you find a couple of things that you recognize in yourself, choose a regulation or anchoring practice to engage in the next one of these arises in your experience
Disconnecting / Disengagement
Relational disengagement is often confused with ideas of independence and autonomy. It is a relational strategy originally used to protect against intrusion and shame. It can be divided into three types of behavioral and cognitive strategies*
Avoidance: tactics aimed at minimizing physical contact or communication
Disengagement: behaviors that limit or eliminate intimacy
Cognitive Dissociation: tactics aimed at perceiving the other person as different or detached from oneself, a loss of shared humanity
Enmeshment
Enmeshment is a description of a particular set of habits, beliefs, and perceptions regarding relationships. It can be enacted between two or more people in which personal boundaries are permeable and unclear. In enmeshment, there is a low tolerance for differences, because they are perceived as a threat. Enmeshment can seem like intimacy to the people caught in this dynamic. Enmeshment is usually a strategy originally used to maintain safety and harmony.
Signs of All Types of Disengagement
1. You make decisions without considering the impact on the other person and call it independence.
2. You may feel numb or empty.
3. You share intimate experiences with someone who is an acquaintance, but not with those close to you.
4. You feel disconnected or indifferent when another person is around.
5. You lack interest in new activities or pursuing goals. Or, you are overfocused on goals.
6. You avoid sharing vulnerability and what matters most to you.
7. You lack curiosity about the experience of others.
8. You don’t initiate contact with friends and loved ones.
9. As you move towards engagement or closeness, you feel discomfort, anxiety, or you shut down.
10. You don’t care whether others are curious about you.
11. You often have thoughts of judgment and blame.
12. You choose to divide up tasks rather than engage in collaboration.
13. You avoid eye contact.
14. You minimize feelings. For example: “It’s no big deal,” “It doesn’t matter,” “It is what it is,” “I am just overreacting,” “You’re too sensitive.”
15. You criticize and find fault with those close to you; you focus on what you don’t like about them.
16. You might have sex, but don’t give and receive affection.
17. You find yourself spacing out while a loved one is talking to you.
18. You don’t share about your experience of life, but rather just relate facts or stories about others.
19. You often have the impulse to withdraw or be alone.
Signs & Symptoms of Enmeshment
1. You cannot not tell the difference between your own emotions and those of someone close to you.
2. You try to fix, advise, or tell someone what they should and shouldn’t do without being asked to do so.
3. When there’s a conflict or disagreement in your relationship, you feel anxiety, fear, a compulsion to fix the problem, or convince the other person to agree with you.
4. You imagine you need to rescue someone from their emotions.
5. You imagine you need someone else to rescue you from your own emotions.
6. You and the other person do everything together. It seems like betrayal or abandonment when one of you attempts to do something on your own.
7. You are defined more by the relationship than your own values. You make decisions based on what you think will please the other person.
8. You neglect yourself or other relationships because of a preoccupation or compulsion to be in the enmeshed relationship.
9. Your happiness or contentment relies on your relationship.
10. Your self-esteem is contingent upon this relationship.
11. You take responsibility for meeting the other’s needs even when it is harmful to yourself.
12. You feel the other’s feelings. If they feel angry, anxious or upset, you also feel angry, anxious or upset.
13. If the other person isn’t happy, you think you can’t feel happy.
14. You strategize about how to get the other person to feel certain feelings and not other feelings.
15. You say ‘yes’ and then resent it later.
16. You lose a sense of autonomy when with this person. You find it difficult to express your own preferences clearly.
17. You should be loyal to the cause and sacrifice and endure.